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Comment by Zigurd | Hacker News Reader

Too broad. Unless you're transferring ink from a typewriter ribbon onto paper in a hut with no electricity, your words, or my words as I type this, are being grammar checked by something partly in the cloud. If I delete my words, are you saying I've transmitted them nevertheless?

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She may have assumed that the chat conversation was private, but it wasn't. She sent a message of intent to harm and a human received the message.

There was no intent for a human to read the message. By your logic, if she wrote a threat in a diary and a burglar broke in and read it, it would be a crime on her part.

Chats with a company's computer aren't private the way a diary is. A better example would be she intended to write it in a word document and instead accidentally sent it in an email to a random person.

Okay so say she wrote it in Office365 in the web browser?

Saying that she “sent a message” is both literally true and obviously intellectually dishonest.

If she had intended to write it in a word document on her computer but instead accidentally wrote it into her email client and sent it to a random person, I'm not convinced she would escape getting charged then either.

It's not any different than telling an automated phone voice tree system that you plan on killing someone and then being surprised that your words were later heard by a human. She absolutely told a company's computer. She sent the message.

The law may have been intended for more direct threats to a person as a means of intimidation, but that's a separate conversation.

Sure, you could intentionally conflate analogies like that if you wanted to mislead.

Yes but the law usually evaluates the application of a statute within the context of someone's mental state. This is why you are not guilty of battery when you trip and accidentally bump into someone. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mens_rea

That depends on the crime; several related crimes are only distinguished by intent. Negligence is itself a crime if it is the cause of a preventable death when the person has a reasonable obligation, such as when driving a vehicle.

I'm not really sure that this can be likened to a diary when it is called a "chat" but that's for the legal system to determine, not me sitting on my couch.

Any reasonable person presumes when they chat with Claude that it is a computer program on the other end. "Claude is AI" is explicit on the page right under the input box. The word "chat" doesn't anthropomorphize the situation.

And yes, some laws are "strict liability", I don't think this one is.

They didn’t receive it, they secretly extracted it by spying on her.

The Florida statute requires that it be transmitted in a manner that can be viewed by another person. If you have no idea that someone could view your communications with a chatbot, did you really intend to break that specific law? Technically, that threat was communicated to another person but not through her own intentions.

What if she mailed it to herself through the post, and her housemate accidentally opened the mail?

Then they are both innocent of their 'crimes' as they were both unintentional.

She wouldn't have intended her housemate to open it, so it wasn't a threat.

And her housemate didn't intend to open it, so it wasn't Obstruction of Correspondence. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1702

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